Month: September 2013
Wounded people, injured, sick, they sit
out front of the Rehab Shoppe on stone
benches and in wheelchairs. People
with no legs and with tumors and one guy
who’s lost his hands in one of the wars.
They smoke their cigarettes, cigars,
and pipes and say, What does it matter?
That we smoke, what we smoke, what
difference can it make? The guy who’s
lost his hands, others hold his cigarette
for him. They hold his glass when it’s
time to drink, and they raise voice in song.
Here’s to vodka, here’s to rum, we’ll drink them
up till kingdom come. Here’s to wine
and here’s to beer, sauce us now we’ve
gathered here. Here’s to whiskey, makes
us frisky, Irish, rye, or malted Scotch.
Here’s to gin and here’s to sin, and here’s
to one last bloody crotch. Last one
dry gets to mop up the mess.
“At a certain level, prose simply makes statements. There are times when all you need to know is that it is raining, but a hell of a lot more is going on. And there are other times when you’ve got to get into every raindrop. And sometimes the sentence has to do that.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
There was only one cashier on
duty and she wasn’t
there. The manager was pissed
off and pushed the restocking
cart into one of the customers,
careful to avoid eye contact.
The automatic change dispenser
didn’t dispense any change.
The cashier arrived and told
the manager, You put it on
backwards. She unlocked her
register, rang up the customer’s
purchases, made change from
her own purse—Have a good day.
“History does not abide by traditional narrative explanations. It isn’t that narrative explanation doesn’t have its place—it is a great instrument—but uncritically examined, its assumptions about the world are, well, unlikely. Within a specific human realm, when we are busy giving meaning to human events selecting, choosing, arranging a story at a dinner party—we may be so taken with the result that we forget that another arrangement could have yielded something quite different. I am not suggesting what some have seen as an inevitable consequence of this particular mode that everything is relative; it’s much more that there are modes of explanation equally satisfactory within their own prescribed realms of discourse.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
“The artist is working with dangerous materials because he is making something that’s got reality in it, and reality is something that the human race flees from. Every culture is busy building some sort of false environment. I am increasingly impressed by how nature permits human beings to make fools of themselves in vast numbers. Cultures of great richness, in fact, can develop that are based in absolute idiocy.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
Foggy morning along a beach populated
by shadows. Two in the shallows,
man and woman, she giggles, No, it’s
not…. His voice low rumbling, she says,
Because, it’s because, that’s all….
Atop each breakwater a solo
shadow, one taking morning
exercise in front of a small
jumble of bikes, two others sitting,
legs dangling over the sand while they
face the beach and wait for
what they’re waiting for. In the park
behind them, three workers
in yellow vests shovel something
from the bed of a city truck.
Back up on the streets, parents
escort their children down designated
safe routes to the stops where
yellow buses wait to carry
them to their hot and crowded
schools. A childless young
couple open the trunk of their
sedan, load it with a blue
picnic cooler, her easel and paints,
his two sets of golf clubs.
The sun is rising and the fog
will burn off long before lunch.
“You can spend paragraphs describing an old mill under the cloud-streaked moon, Chekhov writes somewhere, how the water rushes over the wheel, how heavy and dank its stones are, and nobody will actually see it; merely mention, however, how the moonlight catches on a bit of broken glass lying on a mossy flag atop the millrace … and the whole structure rises, vivid and visible, before the moon-slashed night mists of the reader’s mind!” — Samuel R. Delany (from interview by K. Leslie Steiner in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996, Vol. 16.3; ellipsis in original)
Out back of the main building
in the hard-packed khaki dirt
there’s a long and narrow tin awning
supported on slender steel poles
painted a nubby industrial beige.
Young people wearing jeans or
cargo pants and white t-shirts
and protective helemts swing
baseball bats at each other, not
attempting to make contact and do
each other any harm. The supervisor
tells the visitor, It’s just a game
to develop their martial-arts
skills, see how they smile?
The visitor sees how they swing
their bats and sweat and dance
about in the dust, hears their
calls and shouts, notices a skinny
girls whose pointy breasts poke
against her shirt. He tells
the supervisor, This is bogus.
They should be making contact,
breaking bones and cracking
open skulls, develop some
real-life skills. Give me
a bat and I’ll show you how.
The visitor is given a bat
(the skinny girl’s?) and directed
to a place at the far end
of the awning. This is where
we do that, the supervisor says.
The visitor is shown how he
is to whale away at the fender
of an old red car, scratched
and dented and the metal showing through.
This is how we make our art,
The supervisor tells the visitor,
who begins hitting the fender
with the bat as hard as
he can. Damn, this feels good!,
he grins and checks his backswing
so he doesn’t accidentally hit
any of the t-shirted participants
who have gathered round to watch
and cheer him on. Look at him go!
Beyond the fender, shaded under a tree,
there’s a pond with tiny fish.
When any piece of gravel
or splinter of wood or flake
of paint falls into the pond,
the tiny fish dart to it and
gather round it for a moment,
their noses all pointing to it
and their bodies stretched
so together they look like
a momentarily undulating asterisk.
A moment later and they dart away.
“I’m a writer. My thoughts are formed by writing. When I want to think with any seriousness about a topic, I write about it. Writing slows the thought processes down to where one can follow them—and elaborate on them—more efficiently. Writing is how I do my thinking.” — Samuel R. Delany (from interview by K. Leslie Steiner in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996, Vol. 16.3; emphasis in original)
“What a mad, unhappy animal is man! What strange notions occur to him; what perversities, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestialities of idea burst from him, the moment he is prevented ever so little from being a beast of action!” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)
Families gather in the small lakeside park
every evening. The parents and aunts and uncles
sit in folding chairs and talk. Someone grills
meats on a portable grill. Children play on the beach
and in the shallows. They squeal and scream
and laugh and shout and run around and dig
holes in the sand with toy shovels and their hands.
The children range in age from tiny
toddlers up to young teens. Missing are
the older teens. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,
nineteen, into their lower twenties, they don’t
come to the lakeside park to be with families.
They do other things, rites of power and sex
and death. A seventeen-year-old boy was
shot last night just after midnight,
his body laid out in the street,
covered with a sheet by police.
“Priests are the most evil enemies to have—why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history—but also the most intelligent haters—have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance fades. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)
Eight dollars is the cost of admission to Greenwood Beach.
Seven dollars and a quarter is the federal minimum wage
for hourly workers under certain circumstances. The state’s
minimum is eight and a quarter. These are the wages
beneath which it is considered no worker could be justly paid,
unless that worker is a tipped employee dependent upon
the largesse of drinkers and diners sated with food
and beverage. Or unless the worker is an intern—
interns can be had for free—or a migrant farm worker,
shuffled from field to field, sleeping in a shack, drinking
tepid water from a rusty bucket—or an illegal immigrant
shoehorned two dozen to an apartment, never let out except
to be taken to the job, working sixteen hours a day
for room and board, exhausted sleep filled with American dreams.
“As soon as you get away from actual poetic forms, rhyme, meter, etc., there is no line between prose and poetry. From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers. I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I’ve done in Exterminator!, and then you’ve got a poem. Call it a poem.” — William Burroughs (interviewed by Philippe Mikriammos in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1984, Vol. 4.1)
A slender boy of about twelve
wears a black t-shirt
and black exercise pants with a silver stripe
up each leg like a cavalry trooper’s pants.
He has a stick about as long and curved
as a cutlass. He stands lakeside
at the water’s edge. Waves that reach
to his knees and sometimes up his thighs,
he slashes at them with his cutlass stick
as they come in, wave after wave after
wave after wave, they don’t stop,
he can’t defeat them, can’t drive
them back. With each slash he
gives a high-pitched yelp, but even
these cries don’t stop the lake.
“What we call the ‘novel’ is a highly artificial form, which came in the nineteenth century. It’s quite as arbitrary as the sonnet. And that form had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has a plot, and it has this chapter structure where you have one chapter, and then you try to leave the person in a state of suspense, and on to the next chapter, and people are wondering what happened to this person, and so forth. That nineteenth-century construction has become stylized as the novel, and anyone who writes anything different from that is accused of being unintelligible.” — William Burroughs (interviewed by Philippe Mikriammos in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1984, Vol. 4.1)
The gulls circle above the lake,
searching for supper. They eye
the clear waters below, spot
fish, pause, turn, empty the air
from under their wings in a fall
that looks as if their wings
have suddenly broken, hit the
water beak-first, dive to catch
their meal, come back up and beat
their way back into the sky,
shaking the water from their wings
in a quick shudder as they go.
“A human being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and hindrance—or as a temporary resting-place. The lofty goodness towards his fellow men which is proper to him becomes possible only when he has reached his height and he rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until that time he is condemned to comedy—for even war is a comedy and a concealment, just as every means conceals the end—spoil all his association with others: this kind of man knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
It rained last night.
(This is not the weather report.)
Current conditions: the sun is soon
to rise and the cardinals chirp their high,
metallic, scrapy chirp that sounds like an effect
from German techno-pop of a generation
ago (Trans-Europe Express! First In, First Out!)
There is a man who goes every morning
and every evening to the lakeside park.
He has a black fuzzy-furred dog
who goes with him. The dog sniffs around
as dogs will do while the man walks slowly
and pensively, his head down to watch the lawn
he’s walking on, or up from time to time
to look out at the lake and its deceptive
horizon. Is he watching the lawn? When he’s
looking down, is he watching the lawn?
What does he look for out on the lake,
what does he see, is he looking for anything,
or is he looking for nothing, or is he
looking for the sky to open and show
him the way out? There’s no denying
he has about him an air of the sad.
I could ask him.
Hey, mister
mister
hey
Why do you seem so sad?
Did your wife die? I might be sad
if my wife died, at least for
a little while. I’ve never been
anything other than alone, so I suppose
I’d be fine after a while.
Mister
did you lose a child?
Did you lose your fortune?
Did you miss all the best chances?
Is your time running out?
Were you awake when it rained last night?
Do you know why the police cruiser
was stopped at the corner this morning?
(Neither do I, but I saw it and decided
to throw it in here with all this other stuff.)
I could ask him? Could I ask him?
Then what? If he tells me his truth,
is this still my poem?
Hey, mister
mister
I’m going to put you in my pome
you and your dog
right here in my pome
where I can call all your shots
and get them every one
right here with the techno-chirping birds
and the rain and the cops
it’s—oh, and my wife, she’s not dead,
and not all my children are lost,
not all my fortune’s been pissed away,
not every opportunity has been blown—
here is the one place I can call home.
“He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness; the ability to be as manifold as whole, as vast as full.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale)
The British litmag Litro published my short story, “Lost Things and Missing Persons,” at the end of April this year. I’ve added it to the Previously Published Stories sidebar to the right.
“There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment: that seems to it somehow unfair—certainly the idea of ‘being punished’ and ‘having to punish’ is unpleasant to it, makes it afraid. ‘Is it not enough to render him harmless? why punish him as well? To administer punishment is itself dreadful’—with this question herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its utmost conclusion.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)